The Mother Tongue of Leila Sebbar

Studies in 20th Century Literature Volume 17 Issue 1 Special Issue on Contemporary Feminist Writing in French: A Multicultural Article 5 Perspective 1-1-1993 The Mother Tongue of Leila Sebbar Danielle Marx-Scouras The Ohio State University Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the French and Francophone Literature Commons, and the Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Marx-Scouras, Danielle (1993) "The Mother Tongue of Leila Sebbar," Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 17: Iss. 1, Article 5. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1311 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Mother Tongue of Leila Sebbar Abstract Leila Sebbar grew up in French colonial Algeria where her parents taught French to the indigenous children. The daughter of a metropolitan French woman and an Algerian, Sebbar is a croisée. At the height of the Algerian War, Sebbar left her homeland to pursue her university studies in France. She became a French teacher and made France her home. Sebbar writes in her mother tongue, but she treats it like a foreign language. Although she never learned Arabic and left Algeria, her paternal identity haunts all of her writings. Anchored by the notion of exile, Sebbar drifts between two shores as she seeks to personally come to terms with both a pied-noir and Algerian identity bequeathed by her parents. This dual and contradictory identity allows Sebbar to explore the colonial legacy inherent to immigration in France. Continually on the move or on the run, Sebbar's eccentric protagonists follow a geographical itinerary which acknowledges the common history and cultural heritage of Europe and the Arab world. In forging a new identity for the France of tomorrow, this génération métisse attempts to work through the torturous relationship between France and its former colonies that continues to mark cultural manifestations and political events in France. Keywords Leila Sebbar, French colonial Algeria, indigenous, parent, teacher, Algerian, Sebbar, croisée, Algerian War, French teacher, mother tongue, foreign language, Arabic, Algeria, paternal identity, identity, exile, pied-noir, come to terms, contradictory identity, colonial legacy, colony, colonialization, colonialism, immigration, Europe, common history, history, Arab, world, génération métisse, colonies, Franch This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol17/iss1/5 Marx-Scouras: The Mother Tongue of Leila Sebbar The Mother Tongue of Leila Sebbar Danielle Marx-Scouras The Ohio State University Ce qui m' a toujours impressionnee chez toi, c'est que to parviennes a parler et a daily le francais comme une langue etrangere. What has always impressed me about you, is that you succeed in speaking and writing in French as though it were a foreign language. (Nancy Huston, Lewes parisiennes)1 In introducing Maghrebian literature written in French, it is customary to assert that Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian writers, whose mother tongue is Arabic or Berber, have estranged themselves from their homeland and their people by writing in French.2 Leila Sebbar (b. 1941), who grew up in rural Algeria near Tlemcen, continually writes about being alienated because she uses the language of the French colonizer. But unlike other Maghrebian authors who write in French (e.g. Driss Chraibi, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Abdellcebir Khatibi, Kateb Yacine), that language is Sebbar's mother tongue. She is the daughter of a French mother and an Algerian (Arab) father: a croisee, metisse, or coupee, as Sebbar likes to refer to herself.3 For Sebbar, the French language-or mother tongue-has always connoted exile. It is above all the language that conveys the torturous relationship between France and Algeria personified by Sebbar's parents. French is the language that her mother and father used with each other; it is the language that they taught or inculcated on Algerian schoolchildren growing up in French Algeria. Her mother, originally from the Dordogne region of France, was in exile in colonial Algeria. Her father, who had met his wife in France, was exiled in his own country, where he was a teacher in the French colonial system. By agreeing to disseminate the language and culture of the colonizer, he further cut himself off from his own origins. Separated from the mainstream of Algerian, indigenous life, his friends were, for the most part, evo/ues like himself. In her Lewes parisiennes to Nancy Huston, Sebbar writes: [J]' ai herite, je cmis, de ce double exil parental une disposition a l'exil, j'entends la, par exit, a la fois solitude et excentricite. Mes parents dans leur ecole de garcons indigenes, vivaient en prive, coupes de toutes les communautes. Published by New Prairie Press 1 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 17, Iss. 1 [1993], Art. 5 46 STCL, Volume 17, No. 1 (Winter, 1993) I inherited, I think, from this double parental exile a disposition to exile; by exile, I mean at once solitude and eccentricity. My parents, in their school of indigenous boys, lived in private, cut off from all communities. (50) Exiled from their respective communities, Sebbar's parents were able to co-exist within the protective space provided by the village school. Like Daru in Camus' "The Guest," they sought refuge from their common exile. From his exile within the colonial language in the enclosure of the village school, Sebbar's father protected her foreign mother. In cultivating the small plot of land that surrounded the school and house that did not belong to them, Sebbar's father strove to give his family a sense of roots. He succeeded in temporarily fostering the illusion that the "doors that closed upon [them] every evening did not imprison [them]" (LP 78). But the fantasy of freedom and serenity experienced behind the colonial barrier by Sebbar as a child was brutally dispelled by the reality of war. During the Algerian War for Independence, Sebbar's father was imprisoned by France in his native land. He experienced the ultimate exile, for which the exile in the French language and school, with a French wife and children born French in colonial Algeria, had merely paved the way (LP 78). Sebbar recalls that when war broke out, her father and other Algerian schoolteachers began to speak more and more in Arabic in the colonial schoolhouse. As the repressed tongue surfaces in the colonial space, Sebbar must come to terms with an identity that she too has denied: "Mon pere parle une autre langue, mon pere est un autre. Est-ce que ma mere le sait?" 'My father speaks another language, my father is an other. Does my mother know it?' ("Paroles" 39). Sebbar begins to realize that she can no longer hide behind "l'enceinte coloniale oil le grillage separe la langue de la France des langues indigenes" 'the colonial fence whose wire mesh separates the French language from the indigenous ones' (38). She must come to terms with her colonized identity. Sebbar's relation to the mother tongue is double-edged: on the one hand, it protected her, on the other, it violated her. For Sebbar, everything was reassuring so long as she was her mother's daughter: the daughter, that is, of a metropolitan French woman. Her origins were where her mother had been born and had lived. Sebbar was thus "authenticated in her Frenchness" ("Si je parle" 1183). From early childhood, Sebbar was partial to metropolitan French, the language https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol17/iss1/5 of her mother and the one that she and her father, as good colonial DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1311 2 Marx-ScourasMarx-Scouras: The Mother Tongue of Leila Sebbar 47 subjects, had learned. Sebbar distinguishes between metropolitan French and the bastardized French of the Algerian colony, contami- nated by Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Corsican, and Maltese. Like her father, who spoke French better than the pieds-noirs whose French was dialectal, Sebbar learned the good language, the one taught to the indigenous children who were forbidden to speak their native Arabic or Berber in the classroom ("La langue" 8). But wartime compelled Sebbar to acknowledge the other identity: "Je savais que mon pere etait arabe. Je savais que moi aussi, j 'etais arabe par mon pere" 'I knew that my father was Arab. I knew that I too was Arab because of my father' ("Si je parle" 1185). Yet in setting off for France at the age of seventeen, it was as though Sebbar sought to repress her Algerian origins. For it was at the height of the war (1958) that she left her homeland to pursue her university studies in France. She would only return to Algeria for a brief visit in 1982. For a long time, Sebbar no longer heard the father tongue, which she had already avoided in colonial Algeria. She seemed perfectly at home in metropolitan France until the day her memory was revived. In writing her first fictional piece in French, Sebbar suddenly found herself in exile ("Paroles" 38-39). For some time, Sebbar's university studies separated her from her homeland and her memory of it: "Je ne suis pas en exil. L'ecole me protege conrune elle a protégé ma mere, autrefois" 'I'm not in exile. School protects me, the way it once did for .ny mother' ("Paroles" 39). From the Algerian schoolyard to the French university, Sebbar re- mained hostage to the French language.

Load more